The Goodies' naughty bits revealed for the first time in Australia, 30 years after "Bottomless Bill" was censored

A series of clips from The Goodies that were censored in Australia and feature
topless girls and “Bottomless Bill” has emerged at the country’s national
archives.

By Jonathan Pearlman, Sydney

10:56AM BST 20 Aug 2012

Australian censors cut 21 clips from 12 episodes of the show, which aired at 5-30pm in Australia, compared with its usual 8pm time-slot in Britain.

The clips, deemed inappropriate for young audiences, include male and female nudity and a scene in which Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie drop a coin on the pavement in the hope that a short-skirted passer-by will bend down to retrieve it. In another censored scene, Tim Brooke-Taylor, advertising a cleaning powder called Fairy Puff, encourages a young woman to remove pieces of clothing and have them washed.

Bill Oddie said the cuts were “mainly understandable” and that he and his fellow Goodies had resisted the BBC’s suggestion of an earlier timeslot in Britain. He said the only attempts at BBC censorship were “when we offended the sensibilities of the BBC hierarchy itself”.

”The truth is that The Goodies was originally intended to be a bit risqué,” he told The Sun-Herald newspaper. “Recreational or indeed hallucinatory drugs were integral... Violence to animals was a recurring theme... We were first broadcast at 10pm, and early shows included such adult ingredients as a topless girl, which in a later episode escalated to a bottomless Bill.”

The cuts included a clip from a 1973 episode ”Caught in the Act”, which was censored to remove back view female nudity. The episode was deemed “extremely funny and relatively innocuous” by the authorities, who ruled that “the visual detail and sexually orientated dialogue” made it suitable for adults only.

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Bottomless Bill, who appeared in a 1973 episode, prompted the censors at the Film Classification Board to write: ”Twenty minutes into this GE [general approval rating] which is a knockabout satire on the police, delete shot of naked figure (back to camera) in pool in park."